Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publisher's arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can generate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly and maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table – something we all hate doing.
Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'll be amazed by the results.
I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previously doing so.
The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly helpful Debs, on Sites ell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to give it a go, but I wasn't prepared for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsense ads.
Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to recognize a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:
1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible. 3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the background color of the ad.
These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use the color picker to pick the color you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your site.
Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the reasons for this, perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.
Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads, clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.
The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my own experience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format, called Ad links. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.
Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Adlinks on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. I'm using the four links in a square box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks of running Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on Adlinks is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads. There's no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of 'results'. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.
Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track your results across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about any other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink ads accordingly.
So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give it a go, you'll be amazed by the results.
The power of article marketing is well documented. Not only is it a great way to get quality one-way inbound links to your website, but it also gives the author a way of targeting specific keyword phrases by putting their author resource link on those keywords rather than the name of the website. And beyond all that, articles are actually read by real human beings and give authors an opportunity to demonstrate their expertise directly to their target audience.
Even with this proven track record, article marketing can still be done with little or no money. Indeed, distribution services exist but even those are extremely inexpensive. No, article marketing doesn't take money. I just takes time. Even for the best authors, writing a quality article takes time and the submission process does as well.
The trick is to create an outline for your articles before you sit down to write any of them. Think about all the little facets in your business. Think about all the tiny little topics you could address in a short article. Write all these topics down and strive to put 3 or 4 bullet points under each topic. These bullet points could identify 3 strategies or 3 steps or 3 reasons supporting the underlying topic.
Once you have an outline for multiple articles, each with 3 or 4 bullet points, you can sit down to start typing. Each article should have an opening paragraph introducing the topic, a second paragraph explaining the problem, a paragraph for each bullet point and then a paragraph pulling it all together. In all, your article should have 6 or 7 paragraphs. At 80 words each, that would leave you with an article of 480 to 560 words.
Articles don't have to be long. In fact, articles that are too long don't get read as much. Shoot for 400 to 600 words. That's just enough to cover a topic and provide real value without boring the reader. Keep in mind the reader will eventually find the article on a directory full of thousands of other articles. Yours has to be short and valuable.
The objective is to provide just enough value to inspire confidence from the reader. Demonstrate your expertise so they'll want to read more of your work. And in the latter paragraphs, allude to the fact that there is a lot more to learn and that your website can provide that additional information. Each of your articles provides a link to your website. Encourage readers to use it.
The foregoing description sounds pretty structured. Creative writers will undoubtedly cringe reading my approach. But the fact is that you'll be writing articles every day or at least twice each week. We're all busy. We have to find a way of getting the job done in the shortest possible time frame. Following a specific structure can help you stay on top of the task without monopolizing your schedule.
Article marketing offers too many benefits to ignore. Whether your goal is to build inbound links, target keyword phrases or demonstrate expertise, a well-written article can do the job better than any other strategy. So get a list of topics together, think of 3 or 4 points under each and follow a structure for getting your thoughts on paper.
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